David Barnes, an elegant 40 years old British man is a marine biologist at the British Antarctic Survey. His scientific project during ACE : Evaluating carbon storage capacity in seabed organisms. David teaches zoology and ecology at the University of Cambridge in between two expeditions at the poles of our blue planet. He’s been travelling around since 1990. From the beginning of our trip down to Antarctica, I spot him quite often dropping nets in water. With his collaborators, David collects and identifies creatures such as corals, sea stars, sponges and so on… basically anything and everything that can be found on seabed. I didn’t get it at first, being confused by such activity, till he sat down at my desk and started to draw his science.
See also Mapping carbon capture and storage on sub-Antarctic seabeds, one island at a time: Marion Island, by Maria Lund Paulsen on ASCCC website.

Why are you doing this David? This is going to be long. We should sit. David chose the floor instead of the chair I offered him. Using a bloc of paper and a pen, he gave me a lecture on the meaning of all of this. It took about 1.5 hour. But I will make it short here. I will try my best to share the unexpected and greatly appreciated speach of David.

Climate change is real. Everybody knows that. What is not straightforward for everybody (including me) is that oceans act as a giant vacuum of atmospheric CO2, just like land forests. Two main CO2 sequestration processes in the ocean interior are known: the physical pump and the biological pump, accounting for about 1/3 and 2/3 of the sequestration, respectively. The biological pump is supported by microscopic algae, the phytoplankton, which converts the CO2 into biomass. However, much of the carbon ‘fixed’ within the phytoplankton during this process is converted back to CO2 and released to the atmosphere. Only a very small proportion (less than 1%) of the carbon will ever reaches the ocean sediment where benthic organisms live. The same ones David tries to capture.

As the century-old trees, they have a quite long life, so they can stock the carbon for long period. But not for ever. To be sure that carbon won’t go back in the atmosphere, we have to wait that his organic form turn into a mineral form like fossils to be stock for the eternity. It takes thousands of years. The ACE expedition is a unique opportunity for David Barnes to collect and study these benthic organisms all around Antarctica. They haven’t been collected since Scott’s expedition in 1903. This biologic treasure, a huge data-base coils help answer many questions in this domain.